[1cvmask]

Your story "proves" all the studies with sommeliers where they duped them into rating white wines (with red food coloring) as fancy red wines. All the sommeliers failed the blind tests. In fact all those studies showed was that the taste of wine stemmed primarily from the perception of the bottle rather than the actual taste.

[phonypc]

Might want to refresh your reading on this. AFAIK this is reference to one (unpublished) study where undergrad wine science students tended to choose from a list of descriptive terms usually associated with red wine to refer to dyed white wine, most of the time.

It's certainly true that suggestion can change ones perception of wine (or any flavor), but I don't think it's clear that it's the primary factor.

[jpp]

Yes, this is correct —- it’s actually a fascinating study, but the translation from French was done poorly and then the English-speaking media ran with the clickbait version.

The original study finds that the terms we use for flavor (partly) encode the tuple of flavor and color. That is, given two identical smelling / tasting liquids, subjects will pick different vocabulary to describe the flavor when the liquid is red vs clear.

[smt88]

There appears to be abundant evidence that wine-tasting is largely nonsense, including experiments done on wine judges: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/jun/23/wine-ta...

[phonypc]

There's evidence that wine judging is less objective than most people involved in it seem to believe. I'm not sure that justifies calling it nonsense, or misrepresenting a study as showing that experienced people can't even distinguish white from red.

[smt88]

The link I provided does not cite that study.

[phonypc]

It does actually, but that wasn't really my point in referring to it. More that the GP post misrepresenting the study isn't justified by other evidence of a lack of rigour in the field.

[darkerside]

Why should red and white wines taste so distinguishably different anyway? Because one is red colored and one is white? So what? Seems like your contempt here falls prey to the same biases as the sommeliers.

Of course, you're not supposed to be an expert. But still, seems like a hypocritical thing to make fun of someone else for.

[Niksko]

Because there is a fundamental difference in how they're made: red wines spend more time in contact with grape skins, while white wines don't. Grape skins contain tannins and other compounds that end up in the wine, and humans can perceive these compounds. You might question whether there is enough difference to warrant the perceived difference in flavor, but there are definitely quantitatively measurable differences in composition of typical red and white wines that would lead you to posit that they would taste different.

[darkerside]

I'm not saying they're literally the same. There are also invisible differences between any two wines that have MUCH MORE impact on the taste profile. Red and white can even be the same grape. Are the skins really more impactful than, for example, the type of grape, how the wine was aged, or for how long?

Why is the color so important? Mostly because it's visible to us noobs.

[542354234235]

>Because one is red colored and one is white? So what?

So what depends on why things are different colors. For instance, red velvet cake is just vanilla cake dyed red with food coloring. In that case, there wouldn’t be a difference in taste. On the other end, vanilla bean ice cream has black specks distributed throughout from the contents of the vanilla bean itself. If you substituted black pepper, it might look the same but it would not taste the same. As Niksko explained, red and white wine are different due to differences in ingredients and different processes which impart different flavor and color.

[darkerside]

Yeah, I'm aware of that. See my other comment. I don't know enough to say whether the impact on flavor is proportionate to the impact on color. I'd like to say I'm wise enough to realize that the dramatic change in color is very likely to be more impactful, or at least allow for the possibility.

[ses1984]

Red velvet is actually chocolate cake dyed red.

[542354234235]

Yes, thank you. I knew it, but still wrote vanilla.